


Freezing for you; Burn Alive

by Minka



Category: the GazettE
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 21:14:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1564289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minka/pseuds/Minka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aoi was sinking, drowning and he couldn’t care less. He was burning alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Freezing for you; Burn Alive

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t know if it is happy or sad, if it is an ending or a beginning; it just is. 
> 
> Best read while listening to The Butterfly Effect's 'Consequence'. Copied over from my Livejournal @ http://minka-g.livejournal.com/58854.html

The sky was burning.

Colours leapt across the dark, illuminating stars and highlighting clouds. Their silvery glow stretched out as far as the eye could see; smudges of blue and purple, greens and sepias. The moon was like a ghost ship, bobbing in a pool of dark ink; constant and yet wavering with each breath he took.

Pulsating.

The world had life like Aoi had never seen. No one could say that Aoi was obsessed with beauty though neither was he oblivious to it. He saw the world for its glory, paid tribute to those things that were special and daydreamed about the things he longed to see. Aoi appreciated the wonders the world had to offer and looked upon the splendid like anyone else; a mixture of wonder and awe.

Yet tonight it was otherworldly. An alien landscape fashioned from the mind of a madman and breathed into life from the lungs of a snow queen.

White covered everything, blanketing out colour and smoothing out shapes. Orange lights cast out golden glows, creating shadows and circles of light on the twinkling ground. The windows of shops and houses flashed multicoloured beams of light, illuminating the cracks in the ice caked to the smooth surface. To his left a street light showed the signs of old age, the bulb flickering in a way that told Aoi it would die within the hour. And his breath formed spectre like creatures that danced out from between his teeth and swayed on into the night.

His skin was cold. He could feel it in the shivers that ran through his body, the tingling in his fingertip and the way his lips shook against his teeth.

Cold. Freezing.

Yet heat rushed to his cheeks, flushing his face in a way that no chill ever could. His heart beat quickly, his blood pumping through his body with such a rhythm that it seemed to mock the sluggish pace of the world around him.

Burn. Flames.

He could feel it deep within him. Smouldering. Consuming. A hungry beast denied its vice. A craving so overwhelming that it stole from its surrounds and fashioned its own. Dark caves, deep chasms and endless pits filled with fire and molten rock. A landscape of hellish resemblance that ate the purity of the snow filled night.

Ideas of heaven and hell flooded his mind. White bliss and red pain. Angelic and demonic and the battle between. The struggle for control and life devoid of sin.

The snow always did that too him. Always made him wonder if it was some sort of cleansing ritual of the gods. A need to banish the year’s idiocy and bloodshed with a coat of white dust that would eventually melt away and nourish the earth. A perfect cycle acted out in order to remind humans of what it was to be alive and to have the gift of conscious thought.

Then again he didn’t know what he believed or what was right anymore. Hell, he didn’t even know what the thought of right and wrong had to do with anything. Expected. It was the expected thing that should be going through his head.

Was this right? Was this wrong? Did any of that matter?

Aoi was sure he knew the answer to that. It didn’t. Right was just a shiny ideal and wrong solely existed for the sake of an argument.

All that mattered was that the night sky was on fire yet he could see the burning of the sun in the distance.

Foresight had never been a gift of Aoi’s. Planning and preparation, time management and all that stuff was not a part of his life. Yet looking at that apartment door he could see the glow of future fires and feel the heat of the flames already.

On the other hand, hindsight wasn’t his strong point either. If it had been then he would at least know how long it had been going on. How long had he actually known? There was no way for Aoi to pin point the moment of change, the moment of realization. People always said that such moments were clear and easy to define. That they struck you like a tonne of bricks and that once you pulled your jaw off the floor, you would just know.

But that hadn’t happened for him. For better of worse, his jaw hadn’t been scraping at the floor, he hadn’t been driven into the earth like a nail hit with a hammer.

That didn’t change the fact that he knew.

One minute he was blissfully unaware and then the next it was all that he could think about, all that he could focus on.

Fiery obsession.

Yet that transition may as well have spanned a lifetime as far as Aoi knew. That single moment where his mind opened like a kicked in door felt ageless.

When clarity burned like lies, there was no way to chill the truth. He didn’t need a jacket, or a scarf. Nothing was required to keep the icy bite of winter at bay, not even as he stood there in the middle of the street in a downpour of snow. He could have been naked and that fire would have still been alive, burning deep inside. Feeding off his emotions and boiling his blood.

Maybe that was his curse. To constantly live in the here and now despite his inner wants. To never experience the future or reminisce about the past as to him, none of it existed. Just now. Just this moment and then just the moment that followed. A never ending parade of split second intervals that alone would make no sense.

It seemed like a pretty dark way to spend his life; a man with nothing but the here and now. It meant that anything could happen and yet nothing would at the same time. Expect the unexpected and have a past of mundane, ordinary moments.

As one moment slowly ticked onto the next, Aoi didn’t bother trying to work out what would happen next or what he should contemplate. Snow continued to fall, which was expected, and it soaked into his hair and light clothing as was the norm. The light to his left kept flickering, the stars continued to shine, his breath fogged and cold and hot continued to battle for dominance over his body.

Normal, expected and boring. His curse.

Then the door he was staring at opened and for once Aoi was almost positive that he was living in a moment. A real shiny, movie magic sort of moment. One of his very own.

The door opened and a rectangle of light was obscured by a small figure wrapped in a blanket. Hair that was normally flicked out like flames hung down to rest on narrow shoulders and beneath it all two legs poked out from the bottom of the blanket. They looked strange in their baggy track pants and not the tight confines of jeans and leather.

Despite all that, the figure was unmistakable.

Aoi didn’t move.

The silhouette moved like a labouring beast, short legs shuffling its unusual bulky weight forward. It wasn’t long before slippered feet sunk into the snow blanketing the stairs and that rustle of a feather down grew louder.

Somewhere above a star burned brighter, hotter and more intense.

The flickering light went out.

Darkness and heat, light and cold and the world made even less sense to Aoi now then it had early.

Snow whirled around the figure, hiding his small frame behind a mantle of white. Like a curtain, it obscured Aoi’s view from all that he wanted to see, blinding him with the reflection of the stars and the moon. A shimmery, ever moving pool; a mirror alive with the reflections of those standing outside.

That mirrored façade got closer and the fire within Aoi popped and hissed.

Aoi felt his mind tip, felt his grip on reality slip through his fingers like golden sand. The world moved with such speed that trees blurred into the buildings and the sky became the ground. Pavement covered the heavens and the snow fell upwards. A snow glob, shaken and tipped upside down until the scene enclosed was nothing more than a whirlpool of white plastic and bubbled water.

There were no words to describe what he felt at that moment. No way to possibly conceive the feelings that were flooding him. They started in his heart, or maybe his mind or hell, it could have even been his fingertips that were the culprits as they twitched and curled with each new wave of sensation.

Whatever the origin, Aoi’s body didn’t feel like it could contain it.

With each step that Ruki took, the whirlwind got stronger and stronger, twisting with such a speed that Aoi almost expected his chest to break open and spew forth a world of darkened chaos. Somehow it didn’t, somehow his meagre flesh and bone managed to contain those emotions and in a moment of clarity, Aoi had to question if he had ever truly felt before. Never had he experienced such a dizzying sensation; never had it felt life pulse through him like this.

Emotions couldn’t be alive, they couldn’t be felt with hands or seen with eyes. Scholars could debate it, theorists could argue proof against reason and writers could twist the ideals of it into beautiful words that would dance and spin when read, but it was all just figurative.

The clay of humanity. There to be moulded, there to be shaped. To become something that wasn’t. An alteration to purpose and context itself; there was no way to define them.

An expression was just a mirror of what went on within. A glimpse of the expected reaction to a certain situation that people were free to read as they saw fit. That was all. There was nothing tangible, nothing solid and corporal about feelings. It wasn’t like the neck of his guitar or the warm skin of a lover. It was the sort of thing that you could spend your entire time reaching for, striving to find and to get close to only to have it dance off into the distance. A shadowy figure playing tag that would never let you win.

“What are you doing here?” Ruki finally asked. It was inquisitive, questioning and unsure. Aoi had expected terse and annoyed, short and abrupt. So much so that he didn’t even have an answer to tell himself, let alone one fit for Ruki.

That was the question, wasn’t it? Why here, why now? This night was no more special than the last, or the one before that. Tomorrow could bring anything; the same or something new. An ending or a beginning.

So why now?

He could go anywhere now, be anyone, anything. This moment could have held an entirely different purpose or meaning. Maybe when it was his time to go, to leave life and the world and everything he knew behind he would have some sort of clarity. Be shown a different path. If he’d stayed at home maybe he would have composed their next big hit. Maybe he would have fallen asleep, let a candle catch the curtains and been introduced to his maker before morning.

Yet instead of all that he was there. Standing in the snow and feeling nothing but the heat of a hidden burning sun.

Three weeks. Twenty one days. Five hundred and four hours. Thirty thousand, two hundred and forty seconds. It wasn’t that long. A holiday, a break. Time off. No schedule, no gruelling tours or lives, no practice and forced interviews. No interaction with the rest of the band. A much needed respite from the tempers and snarky words that came from overworked minds and tired bodies.

Pure bliss.

So why was he here on day eight? One hundred and ninety-two hours into his freedom and he was standing in the middle of a snow storm across the road from a well known apartment.

Puppet strings. Maybe he had them coming out of his back, his shoulders and knees and considering where he was, Aoi almost wanted to check. Better to be safe than sorry.

For all its craziness it was as good an excuse as any. A reason for his actions, an explanation for his inexplicable behaviour and own confusion. He was merely a device of someone else’s creation, a pawn on a chess board being moved by some higher power.

While he was desperate for an answer, somehow even Aoi didn’t think that any of those were a good idea.

That was a hard thing to come to terms with. To be blindsided by his own mind in such a way. Standing there he didn’t even have the thought to be stunned, to show his confusion so the other man might better make sense of the senseless situation. It was like an angel without wings or a precious thing broken, smashed in the heat of the moment. A weight added to a sinking body and suddenly he was breathing under water while kicking violently for a surface that didn’t exist. Lungs were no longer needed, basic bodily functions were there to be ignored. His mind was playing ticks, his fingers responding in kind by tapping against his palm and Aoi had never been more lost.

Sinking, drowning and he couldn’t care less.

“I don’t breathe without you.” The words were said before thought, before conscious decision to speak. They just were; existed like the philosophical concept of emotions. Spoken into the night, their lives were short. The seven syllables stolen by the wind.

Rational thought said that that was it. That Aoi had spoken them, Ruki had heard them and then they ceased to exist but Aoi almost begged to differ. Did they float on in the breeze, tumbling down the street with the feather light snow flakes to grace the ears of another? Did someone else standing in the snow hear them, feel them, sense them the way Aoi did?

Ruki took a step closer, his head tilted to the side in question. An arm reached out, pale hands adorned with stubby fingers stretching across time and space to seek a touch. Fingers that could barely stretch to make a full fret traversed continents to slowly close around Aoi’s wrist, all the while shaking from the cold.

Heat flared up across Aoi’s skin as Ruki’s touch branded him; marked him with a display of the same temperature raging through his own body.

Burning alive.

The searing contact moved, setting Aoi alight and engulfing his mind. Fingers moved down his wrist, stroking their heat across his palm and wrapping his entire hand in that molten fireball.

A slight pull, a gentle tug and a smile that banished the snow for good and Aoi swore that the world could burn and he wouldn’t care. Flames could rise from the pits of hell to swallow them whole and Aoi would embrace them. Just as long as he felt that touch once more; that warming comfort that defied all odds and battled the cold of winter.

Just once more…

The snow fell in shapes as Aoi walked, the white particles no longer random. They twinkled, they danced and for a moment Aoi thought he saw figures. Laughing, joyful figures; the epitome of emotion caught freeze-framed in that perfect moment.

Aoi followed and the sky burnt, fragments of it charring to darkness and floating down to earth. It created fields of ashes, long and bountiful, crushing flowers and buildings alike.

A shimmering layer of light and shadow.

When they reached the door, Ruki looked back at him, an unfathomable look on his face. Was it the true face of emotion that peered at him through eyelashes trimmed with snowflakes? It didn’t seem like an expression yet his eyes said too much for it to be a blank, casual look.

He wondered what the other man saw when looking back at him. Did Ruki question these sorts of things as well? Was the mind of the vocalist as complex as the lyrics he crafted and if so, why didn’t he show it? Or was Aoi just too blind to see until now?

Then again, it didn’t really matter. Not now. Not as he felt Ruki’s tiny hand warm in his. It never did and it never would; the perfect moment that could only exists within the here and now. The night could fall all over them, shroud them in a blanket of white offset by darkness. Bury them alive and plunge them into the deepest waters and it honestly didn’t matter.

The world was on fire and Aoi hadn’t asked for it. He hadn’t even contemplated it until seven days ago; one hundred and sixty-eight minutes, ten thousand and eighty-seconds. He hadn’t wanted it, hadn’t dreamed of it; it was just there.

A moment set and sealed in fate.

The door closed behind them, blocking out the reaching tendrils of cold air. Embraced by the heat Aoi felt cold sweep across his skin for the very first time. He shivered, his teeth chattering and his jaw cramping from the unusual reaction.

The world was frozen. Ice clung to the walls, stalagmites hung from the ceiling and Aoi’s breath turned to ice crystals that clattered to the floor as he exhaled. His lung burnt in a way that could only been perceived as cold and blood stopped running to his extremities and fingertips.

The change terrified him, the frozen world of indoors cut into his mind like a knife until he cringed backwards towards the closed door.

Lost and confused, Aoi looked for an answer, a reason for the icy chill of the room and the stiffness in his body. It didn’t take him long – there was nothing but a frozen wasteland of a room to see anyway – before he finally looked down. A singe sweep of his eyes and it all made sense. Another moment that existed for him alone and Aoi smiled despite the freezing fear because now everything was as crystal clear as the ice that surrounded him.

Ruki had let go of his hand to turn the lock.


End file.
